Jake

Just know you’re dead to me.

Come back in six months with this take, once the game is out and people have had time to digest it a little. Return isn’t out yet, Escape has been out for two decades. When Escape was announced people were tentative because of the look and introduction of 3D, but the prevailing feeling was “wait and see, it’s a new monkey island after all!” (Also: I really like and appreciate your enthusiasm for Escape. It’s not my favorite game by a long shot, but there’s a lot to like in it, and you can tell the team worked hard on it.)

👀 👕 I beat #Mojole #123 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 4/6 🖤💛🖤🖤💛 💛🖤💚🖤🖤 💛💚💚🖤💛 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

The Wii was tales of MI’s target platform and it was really bare bones even by Telltale standards. There was no way all of Flotsam Town was going to fit in one scene, so it was split into two with a camera cut in the middle (between the courthouse and the glass blowers shop), which has a load delay the first time you visit it in any play session. It meant we could never present the town from a big wide shot like you see in the concept art.

Ryan Jones clearly attempted to continue this feeling in Tales’ concept art, but the final camera work and (crucially) the Wii requiring the scene be split into two separate game environments meant it never got to have this effect in game.

Guybrush Threepwood occupies a space in my brain similar to Gordon Freeman: he’s almost an empty vessel for my own thoughts and experiences, a theming around my cursor to help frame the choices imposed on me as a player by the game’s design, and not a character with a ton of hopes, dreams, hangups. Guybrush’s desires align closely with my own, especially in the early games that formed the foundation of the series. He wants to prove himself worthy of solving the mysteries of the game, to have a real pirate experience, to get to say the best comebacks, etc. He has more to him than that, sure, but he’s far more of a player vessel than Ben or Manny. Note he was conceived of as a guy named “guy.” I don’t think that’s a bad thing - I think the ability to see yourself in the game through him is part of what works about the Monkey Island formula. For that reason it’s never really bothered me that he changes shape and size. When Dom started voicing him in Curse, that was the hardest jump for me because suddenly my interiority had a voice, but now I’m used to it and welcome it - it’s almost like my interiority is now in audiobook form and has always had the same narrator doing a bang up job. To be clear, I think there is more to guybrush than that, but it’s stuff that gets revealed when he ends up (what I perceive as) off the mark in a story. For example in Escape I felt like Guybrush started becoming the butt of the joke not just to the people around him, but to the game itself. In the earlier games, the games seemed to be on his side more. In Escape and even Curse, the inciting incident is “Guybrush is a screw-up who everyone’s mad at,” where the player is tasked with cleaning up the player character’s mess as the goal of the game, but that wasn’t always the case. Eg at the start of Monkey Island 2, Bart and Fink are dismissive of everything Guybrush accomplished, but Guybrush will have none of it, insisting he’ll prove them wrong and repeat his success by finding Big Whoop. He then basically turns to the camera and says “we’ll do this together,” and you believe it.* So, Guybrush as a guy who perseveres in the face of impossible odds and a lack of faith from his peers seems like an actual character trait that you can say is part of who he is, and when people “get the character wrong” it’s because he strays from that template without reason. (But even then, part of why that’s who Guybrush is, is because it’s the way players are coming at the game.) * the game still does bring LeChuck back by Guybrush behaving like a goober outside the players control, when he shows Largo LeChuck’s beard, but it’s still not the inciting event for the story, it starts an ominous B thread slow cooking that doesn’t collide directly with you until the end of the story.

I’m not going to claim “it’s all Disneyland,” but Tom Sawyer’s Island in both the CA and Florida park has always had a good mix of foliage that feels “adventurous” without being explicitly regionally tropical.

That was rough 👕 I beat #Mojole #120 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 6/6 🖤💚🖤💛💚 🖤💚💚🖤🖤 🖤💚💚🖤💚 🖤💚💚🖤💚 🖤💚💚💚💚 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

Looks like it’s reversed on the pack-in poster

I would be happy if nothing else was shown!

(I moved the page of bootleg Monkey 1 merch discussion to the poster project thread)

👕 I beat #Mojole #115 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 3/6 🖤🖤💛🖤💛 💚🖤💚🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

For the Sam & Max remasters, we did two discs in a gatefold for the PC version, and one disc in a sleeve for the console versions. Maybe they'll be doing that here? Either way doing variants of a disc is incredibly cheap, so it wouldn't be surprising if the discs themselves were different either.

Seems like it was extra content added on by whoever did the CD arrangements (presumably the same person who wrote the Stan’s track?)

The game only has a fully five letter dictionary like Wordle does. The only 1-4 letter words it will accept are words that are past or future Mojole wildcard words. So there are a few in there that it will accept but not many.

They’ll almost definitely each be packaged individually, in a nicely laid out box interior. Limited Run doesn’t just throw this stuff in the box like companies did in the 80s. I love the inclusion of fake barf. It’s really in line with the game.

Took me a minute but hooray 👕 I beat #Mojole #113 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤💚 💛🖤🖤💛🖤 💚🖤💚🖤💚 💚🖤💚🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

I’m going to try and attend.

Rude AF Eep ook ack! I failed at #Mojole #112. 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

That’s my understanding as well.

The crow can be seen on the box! Once you see it you can’t unsee. It’s such a good detail.

I dumped them all into a Twitter Moment (basically twitter's version of a playlist) for easy viewing: https://twitter.com/i/events/1546172305243398144

Wooo that one was tough. 👕 I beat #Mojole #109 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤🖤🖤💛🖤 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤💚🖤🖤🖤 🖤💚🖤💛🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

Yep no lies detected. 👕 I beat #Mojole #105 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 3/6 💚🖤🖤🖤💚 💚💚💛🖤💚 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

YouTube comments weren’t a social network in and of itself at that point. Social media was generally just less of a thing. Everyone’s parents were starting to file into Facebook, but people weren’t using it as a news source. Twitter barely existed, Reddit barely existed (if it did yet)? Same with 4chan. It was a transitional time for sure, but still an era before everyone was pushed together into like-minded buckets by algorithms. It was also an era where the majority of fan conversations were still happening in heavily moderated spaces (like the Telltale forums) before all conversation was offloaded to third party spaces that were either optionally moderated or totally free for all.